Artistic process
Time expands. Ideas emerge, along with the desire to explore, learn, create, and share. It's curious how certain intuitions seem clear and complete in your head, and then, when you try to write them down, you realize they were precarious, nebulous, and insubstantial.
Writing is a form of reflection for me. Drawing is, too.
It's a bending in oneself that is reflected in the position of the body. As in Nick Sousanis's cartoon from “Unflattening” (2015) [1] shows:
[1]
I've always seen drawing and writing as ways to uncover my thoughts and take a step back to observe them outside of myself for the first time. A way to discover and build relationships. And to get to know myself and the Other better.
Sometimes this process has shown me the invisible: it has brought to light something that was hidden and made me aware. Sometimes, like today, it has revealed the insubstantiality of my intuitions: their confusing and superficial nature, their need to be clear and structured. To be re-thought, re-internalized, re-written. It's the essence of the artistic process, at least for me: giving body to thoughts with a pen or a pencil, observing them from the outside, channeling them back into the mind, elaborating them again, shaping them once more on the paper. And it's a pattern that recurs, practically identical, even when I work in an academic setting, when I have to write an essay or conduct research.
It’s a process that requires attention, concentration, distance, and closeness. In a word: time. It may seem obvious, but it wasn’t for me. Until recently, I believed that talent meant having a good idea right away, doing it, and moving on to the next one. Easy peasy. To me, stagnating on a project for a long time was a symptom of not having had a good idea at all, of not being intelligent or expert enough to develop it quickly and. My perception of artistic and academic production was therefore tainted by the myth of genius, or, as Nochlin called it, the "golden nugget" (Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, 1971): something you have or don't have.This belief has long been a source of frustration for me and a limitation on my possibilities. It has trapped me in sterile, self-pitying whining ("If I don't do good things quickly, it means I'm not good enough, I don't have talent, I am not an artist"); it has prevented me from looking far ahead (indeed talent alone is not enough, you need the perseverance to move forward, the courage to make mistakes by stepping outside one's comfort zone, you need self-confidence, the means to support oneself and the luck of meeting the right people at the right time); and it has imposed a false moral genealogy on me (it is not being that determines doing, but doing that determines being). Restoring time's power and one's abilities to their needs is for me a way to humanize one's work and establish the right relationship with the space one occupies in the world.
While I was writing today, I realized how my ideas for the title of my latest artistic project, "The Mad Woman in the Attic," encompassed two different fields. One political, where I focus on academic research, reports, and social commentary essays. And one personal, where I present my personal experience and work on storytelling and collective memory.
I considered the possibility of maintaining both, consistent with my basic research, which revolves around the slogan "The personal is political" (Hanisch, 1970). But I wondered if this topic was far too complex to be addressed just in a single project.
I wondered if once again it wasn't a mistake dictated by haste, by wanting an immediate result.
I wondered if it wasn't a beginner's mistake, wanting to say everything at once.
[2]